A student entered the classroom
of my colleague with a rat.
Really.
The rat was traveling
visibly underneath the boy’s
clothing, around the stomach
and the chest, up and down
the sleeves and nestling in
the wide birth of his hoodie hood.
It made a girl scream.
The lesson, whatever it was,
is inevitably interrupted.
My colleague, I don’t know,
loathe as he always is to
the possibility of alienating
his students, even the ones with rats,
made the best of it.
And in the end the screaming
girl really did want to see it,
perhaps, even, to touch it,
and the boy learned that
if he wanted to bring his rat
to school, he would, as they say,
have to keep it under wraps.
And I end up in such admiration
of my teacher friend, knowing
that I could never be so magnanimous
in the face of a rat under wraps,
that I would have wanted the boy
stripped of his rat and the rat of his boy
forever and ever, amen.